I want to start taking my blog and my personal brand a lot more serious. I truly enjoy writing and teaching ever since I was a TA in university. Also very often by writing about things I learned it gets me to look at things from a different perspective and continues my learning process. There is also the giant benefit of actually having a knowledge database for myself. It is not uncommon for me to go back and look at my own blog posts when I work on projects.

I have decided to write down my goals for 2014. During this process I was inspired by Scott Britton’s blog How to Set Goals for 2014 .

How I set goals

Four things are important to me for my goals.

Goal Description

Just a general human readable description.

Measurable Goal

This is less obvious, I see many people say things like I want to go to the gym, or lose weight. If you can’t measure it, how can you achieve your goal? I have set my goal with a general description and than wherever humanly possibly added a measurable goal. Example is I want to go to the gym once a week.

Triggers

This is something I just recently learned from Chris Lemas email list course: Blog More Regularly. It is free, and has lots of value. You can sign up at the end of this post: http://chrislema.com/blogging-thought-leadership/. Any repeating goal needs some sort of starting trigger. Especially the regular goals are much easier to accomplish if you couple them with a habit you already have. I for example will take the Saturday morning breakfast as my blog trigger. This will be the time I write for my blog. You should also couple your measurable goals with a trigger. Instead of saying I want to go to the gym once a week, better is: I want to go to the gym ever Tuesday after work. Now you have a measurable goal with a trigger. You know exactly if you are sticking to your goals or not.

Accountability

What are goals if you just write them down for yourself and nobody knows about it? We are all lazy and I sure as hell am guilty of this. I need some extra “motivation”. I have put my goals in the middle of my living room on a white board. I want to see them every day to not forget them. I have also set a regular bi weekly email reminder to check them (my accountability trigger) and as you can see am sharing my goals publicly in my goal mind map below.

My goals

Above you have my goals for 2014. The acutal goals itself are less important since they are fairly personal and depend on each person so I will not go into any details even though there are definitely some funny ones like “shower at least ever second day”. Don’t ask me how it made it onto the list :).

What is interesting though is the colors I used:

Red: General parts of my life I have goals in

Blue: Goal description

Green: Measurable unit to goal

Orange: Trigger

I am a big fan of visual information, using different colors is just part of it. I only wished I could have had a black background with white, yellow, blue and green colors to write with…

Do you have goals for 2014? I would love to hear in the comments below what strategies you follow for your yearly goals. Pls share your thoughts.

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Comments

I comme?t whenever I espe?ially enjo? a post oon
a web?ite or if I have s?mkething to contribute to the discussion.

Usually it is c?uzed by the f?rre displayed in the ?ost I read.

And after thus post 2014 Goals – Goal Description, Mesurable Goals, Trigge?es and Acco?nt?bility ? schurpf.com.
I was e?cit?d enough to l?abe a thought I actually do have some questions for
you if it’s ?llr?ght. Is itt just me or do a fe? ?f these resp?nses look as if th?y are left by brain ?ea? visitors? And, if you are posting ?n other place?, I’d like to follow anthing neew yo? have too post.
Coulkd youu make a list ?ll of your shared pages like your
twitter feed, F?cebook page or? linkedin profile?